After MSFT started to open source .NET Core, it eventually found its way on my Mac OS as well.

The easiest way seams to be installing the .NET Execution Environments using Homebrew based the instruction given at Github.

sudo brew tap aspnet/dnx
sudo brew update
sudo brew install dnvm

Afte registering dmvm via

source dnvm.sh

one now should be abel to install .NET core using the following dnvm commands

dnvm upgrade -u
sudo dnvm install latest -r coreclr -u

For whatever reason I permanently run into issues such as

Installing to /Users/andreas/.dnx/runtimes/dnx-mono.1.0.0-beta6-12004
find: /Users/andreas/.dnx/runtimes/dnx-mono.1.0.0-beta6-12004/bin/: No such file or directory
chmod: /Users/andreas/.dnx/runtimes/dnx-mono.1.0.0-beta6-12004/bin/dnx: No such file or directory

First of all, I tried tried to update dmvm itself and again run into issueS:

foo@mac-pr:~/.dnx$ dnvm update-self
~/.dnx/dnvm/dnvm.sh doesn't exist. This command assumes you have installed dnvm in the usual location and are trying to update it. If you want to use update-self then dnvm.sh should be sourced from ~/.dnx/dnvm
andreas@mac-pro:~/.dnx$

As very last attempt, I tried to run all these stuf as su. Unlike on Linux systems, root is not enabled by default on MAC OS though. Therefore it was necessary to enable the root user following these steps.

For a couple of weeks I now this really annoying message during the start up of my Yosemite installation.

To view this web content, you need to install the Java Runtime Environment.

If I do follow the instructions of the pop up, I usually land on the Java site.

As I develop on a regular base, I have the latest version of Java already installed (right no it should be version 8u25). Therefore, nothing to do.

I case you thought of installing Apple’s Java version for Mac. That’s IMHO not the way to solve the issue. You might cure the symptoms, however, you will not fix the root cause for this issue.

To get rid of the message, you need the find the root cause. In my case it was the attempt to try Facebook’s video chat some weeks ago. That was the only one installation I performed since I receive this message. Even though, I disabled the add-on in Firefeox, the message kept showing at start up.

To get finally rid of the message head straight to the terminal and enter

launchctl interfaces with launchd to load, unload daemons/agents and generally control launchd. launchctl supports taking subcommands on the command line, interactively or even redirected from standard input. These commands can be stored in $HOME/.launchd.conf or /etc/launchd.conf to be read at the timelaunchd starts.

Anyway, you shot not get a list of off all jobs loaded into launchd. There ckeck if you can find com.facebook.videochat.{username}.updater in this list. Wondering what this is? It’s some kind of Facebook-collects-your-data thing. Honestly, I don’t want to know much more about what it does, I just want to get rid of it.

Check out

ls ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ | grep facebook

You should get something like com.facebook.videochat.{username}.plist.
Now run

Again, you should fine something like FacebookVideoCalling.bundle. Send it to /dev/null via

rm ~/Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/FacebookVideoCalling.bundle

Now there still something to get rid of by calling

rm -R ~/Library/Application\ Support/Facebook/

Et voiá, your are done. The cause for the message should be gone by now.

To get rid of the JAR file itself use Spotlight to looking for FacebookVideoCalling. You should find something like FacebookVideoCalling_v1.6.jar. Use Finder then to get rid of it.

That is, by the way, the only thing Facebook suggest to uninstall the videochat. Not only, the sort of infect you with the above updater, they also do not provide useful information for uninstalling the stuff.

The fact, Facebook’s add-on installed this nasty updater is quite annoying. Adding a job to the launchd for an Firefox add-on is quite questionable. Even more annoying that this one slipped through the cracks.

In my current project, moving my home server from a PC Tower running Windows Server 2003 to a more energy as well as space efficient Mac mini, I need to migrate quite a bunch of tools and scripts from Windows to Ubuntu.

Said that, hMailServer served me well for years on my local network. It was easy to install, maintain and run. However, I was now looking for some more lightweight solution for the new server.

The need can be summarized quite easily:

arbitrary devices and services on the local network need to be able to deliver mails via SMTP to the server

local services on the server need to be able to send out mails as well

the server needs to forward the mail to my real server

very basic authentication is a must

it need to run on my old 1.66 Ghz Mac mini

At all it’s as simple as the following diagram:

After digging through all the stuff such as Sendmail, Postfix and so on, I ended up with Exim4 as the perfect solution for my needs.

Basically, after installing it via

sudo apt-get install exim4

the only thing is to quickly run through the setup.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

It’s sort of guided and quite easy to do as long as you have some experience with networks. However, there are quite some pitfalls which are quite annoying if you are little experienced with Exim.

Network Interfaces

Assign all network interface IP addresses you want to listen for incoming mails as seen below.

However, make sure providing only IP addresses from network interfaces, which are actually connected to the network. Otherwise the daemon might fail to start.

The Missing Plain Auth Advertisement

So far, everything works as a charm. However, for the recent setup, I wanted to have plain authentication for most of my clients. This did cost me half a day to figure out and drove me almost mad while digging through tons of Exim docs.

First of all, activate plain authentication for the server by changing the configuration

I am currently in the progress of moving my entire home automation server from Windows 2003 to a Ubuntu LTS. However, connecting to the new server via SSH is quite painful. As I am using openHAB including the Eclipse-based editor, I would prefer to connect to the server from Windows and Mac via RDP.

I tried quite a while using XRDP, but almost gave up as I always had trouble, either not being able to connect or having no desktop at all.

Therefore, kudos to Mike Rehner, who came up with a step by step guide how to install and cofigure XRDP on Ubuntu.

20 minutes absolutely worth watching, especially as he comes up with two or three hints, I haven’t foundon any other tutorial so far such as

Yesterday, Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft announced Microsoft is going to open source the .NET platform. Since I left Microsoft in 2011, this is one of the moments I am most stunned. There is a fully featured community edition of Visual Studio, Android emulator, .NET open sourced under the MIT License, support for Linux and Mac OS X. Further background information can be found on my former colleague Immo’s post over here.

I went from Windows to Mac once I left, dug into Python, Java, a lot of Apache projects and somewhat C++ and JavaScript, developing for the new Jolla and Sailfish OS and contributing to the IoT project OpenHAB. Anyway, I never really was that overwhelmed by the dev ecosystem as I was with Microsoft.

It does not look like the Microsoft I left at all, however, with these major changes, I will be definitely one of the first nailing .NET on my Mac OS X. I am looking forward for this. For today, I will install the new Visual Studio Community 2013 on my virtual Windows, though.

You probably have heard of the SSL 3.0 vulnerability aka Poodle. So if you haven’t or if you have and haven’t done anything about it, it’s definitely time to switch it off.

I simply went though my browsers and turned it of, as nowadays it should not be used anymore. To check if your browser is vulnerable, just check out the Poddle Test. If it does look like below, follow the instructions to make it look different.

Firefox

In Firefox you simply type in

about:config

in the address bar of the browser. In the configurations settings you now need to set the value for security.tls.version.min to 1.

Once done, you should be safe, I was told. However, using Firefox ESR 31.1.1, the Poodle Test above still indicates vulnerability.

However, with version 32.0.3 on Mac OS X, setting the minimum TLS version works as a charme.

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Andreas Heil is a professional software engineer from Karlsruhe, Germany. He graduated in computer science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and received his doctoral degree in Web Engineering from the Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany.
He is software development manager for a big data cloud solution. He has been working in the scrum teams, including the development team for the leading software vendor for law companies in Germany. Before, he worked several years for Microsoft Germany and Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. For many years he is writing for the professional developer magazine dotnetpro in Germany.